He led a party of keelmen to join the rising, and in crossing Rothbury Common met a number of Scotsmen on their way home to enlist for Pretender.
Marching with the expedition to Kelso, where the main body of the Jacobites joined them, he preached to the whole army a morale-boosting sermon, from Deuteronomy chapter 26, verse 17: "The right of the first-born is his".
When the expedition reached Penrith, he was, on account of his local knowledge, engaged in an attempt to intercept William Nicolson, the Bishop of Carlisle, at his residence, Rose Castle.
[1] In the book's preface Patten dated the origin of the rising from the 1710 trial of Henry Sacheverell and "the licentious Freedom of some in their publick Discourses, and others in their Addresses, to cry up the old Doctrine of Passive Obedience, and to give Hints and Arguments to prove Hereditary Right".
[2] Patten figures as "Creeping Bob" in Sir Walter Besant's Dorothy Forster, an historical novel of the Northumbrian share in the rising.